My husband and I went to a friend’s house for a private home circle to do a little table tipping. For those of you who are not familiar with table tipping that is where we all sit around a small wooden table and invite Spirit to connect with us by making the table move. Through the movements of the table we are able to determine who we are speaking to and they can answer questions for us. These friends of ours have a nice little séance room with great energy. We have had home circles with them several times in the past and we have always had good experiences.

This time we decided to try and see if we could get a trumpet to work. This doesn’t mean that we were trying to play a musical instrument. In Spiritualist circles the trumpet is just a hollow cone of tin that you place on the table and ask Spirit to make it move. I have heard lots of accounts of people experiencing trumpet phenomena, but before this I have never personally seen it happen.

Usually trumpet phenomena takes place in a dark room, and most trumpets have a florescent band around them so that you can see them in the dark. In our case, it was evening, but we had one small light in the room so the lighting was dim, but not dark. There were 6 of us in the room and all of us could see very clearly what was happening.

Throughout the history of Spiritualism there have been many cases of fraud or suspicions of fraud involving trumpet use. Because it usually takes place in a darkened room it would be easy to have someone move the trumpet and pretend it is Spirit. However, just because it is possible to make this phenomena appear fraudulently does not mean that it is always fraud.

On this particular occasion there was no possibility of fraud. First of all, there was no need to fake it. This was a private home circle among a group of friends who are already Spiritualists and who are already convinced that physical phenomena exists. No money was involved, and no one stood to gain anything from it other than the excitement of seeing it.

Secondly, the decision to try the trumpet was a spur of the moment thing, no one had an opportunity to rig something up to make it appear that it was moving if it wasn’t actually happening. One of our friends had mentioned that afternoon that he thought the trumpet would work that night if we tried it. I had assumed that we would be using the trumpet of the people whose home we were going to, but I decided as we were heading out the door to bring my trumpet along just to let it sit in their séance room for a while to “charge it up” because I had never had any success getting my trumpet to move.

When we got to our friends’ house the husband informed us that his trumpet was missing, and I responded that we could try mine. (Why his trumpet was missing is interesting, and could be the topic of another blog entry at some point.)

We started our circle that night with some table tipping and it was working really well, but after exactly one hour, all of a sudden it was like someone turned off the switch. The table stopped moving. So we decided to try putting the trumpet on the table and immediately the trumpet began to vibrate and bounce around on the perfectly still table. It lifted off the table about a half an inch and swayed back and forth. Some thin milky white translucent strands of something that appeared to be mist began coming out of the top of the trumpet (ectoplasm). One of my friends put her finger into these misty strands a few inches above the trumpet and began to swirl it around pulling the trumpet along with it.

The trumpet stopped about a half an hour after it began. We all headed off home and all 6 of us slept like logs that night. The old timers of Spiritualism used to claim that Spirit uses our energy to create the ectoplasm to move the trumpet. I’m not sure yet what I think about how or why this sort of phenomena works, but I can say with complete confidence that it does work.